UK Vinyl Sales Reach New Post-CD High

Old men buying new versions of things they used to like have kicked vinyl sales in the UK to new post-digital highs highs, with the number of 12-inch music discs sold last year hitting levels not seen for 25 years.

The BPI says that 3.2 million vinyl records were sold last year, as the ironic trend for walking out of Tesco with a disc-based version of an old Iron Maiden record continued to expand.

The overall "consumption" of music was up by 1.5 per cent over the year too, says the BPI, with the streaming of music covering most of that increase. Somehow it counted up the number of individual music streams too, revealing that 45 billion audio streams were pinged out to listeners, during 2016 -- 68 per cent more streams than the year before.

Across all formats, physical and virtual, 123 million albums were listened to last year. Most of which were Adele, as her 2015 release 25 still managed to be the most popular standalone artist record of 2016 -- with compilation behemoth Now That’s What I Call Music 95 the overall bestseller. Probably didn't do that well on vinyl, though, where it was all Bowie reissues, Amy Winehouse, Radiohead and Fleetwood Mac taking the vinyl format up to 4.7 per cent of total album sales. [BPI via BBC]